March 2017 Blog Posts (27)

Ronald “Ronnie G.” Giallanzo is described by authorities as a career criminal. His criminal record is pretty voluminous, which isn’t strange considering he’s been a made member of New York’s Bonanno crime family for nearly two decades…

Ralph Natale was the first official boss in the American Mafia to become a turncoat and testify against his former underlings. During a short spell in the 1990s, he led what was left of the Philadelphia crime family after nearly two decades of violence. In his biography Last Don Standing: The Secret Life of Mob Boss…

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, New York, charged Bonanno crime family mobster Vincent Asaro (photo above, right), John J. Gotti (photo above, left), and five other men yesterday with a variety of crimes including arson, robbery, and home invasion. Both Asaro and Gotti – as well as two other defendants - pleaded…

The thief behind one of the biggest art heists in history stepped into the spotlight yesterday as he went on various Dutch talk shows to discuss how he stole two Van Gogh paintings worth millions from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and eventually sold them to a Camorra drug boss. In between, he also claims to…

UFC superstar Conor McGregor continues to draw inspiration from the life and times of infamous gangsters and mob bosses. This weekend, he posed for a photo which he captioned with: “Flinging turkeys out the truck like Bumpy Johnson.”

Police in Italy scored a nice bonus this week when they busted a Neapolitan Camorra clan and recovered two stolen paintings from Vincent van Gogh worth $100 million in the process. The paintings of the Dutch master had been stolen in Amsterdam in 2002 and were missing ever since. Beside the painting, authorities seized…

Sacramento drug boss Israel “Puck” Washington was sentenced Thursday to 34 years in prison for trafficking heroin, cocaine, cocaine base, and methamphetamine. 43-year-old Washington used various businesses as a front to conceal and disguise his extensive drug trafficking and operated a large crew of …

Japan’s National Police Agency claims a success in the fight against the country’s organized crime element, better known as the Yakuza: its membership is declining rapidly. On Thursday, officers announced that by the end of last year all of Japan’s …

The Japanese Yakuza is one of the more traditional Organized Crime groups. The Yakuza are the main power in Japan and have branched out to other Asian countries, the United States, Canada and parts of Europe. However Japan remains their main stronghold. The Yakuza are active in gambling, drugs, prostitution,…

If he had made it through, it would’ve been the score of a lifetime - both for him and the organization he was working for. Instead, Yesterday, 68-year-old Michael McDermott (photo above), a boat skipper from Ireland, was convicted of trying to smuggle 939 kilograms of cocaine worth an estimated £84 million pounds…

After high school, I lived a strange sort of double life. I had my normal friends, and then I had my cousins and the guys I hustled with. I tried working a few odd jobs, but hated manual labor and I always quit after a few days. I used to joke and tell people, “I think I’m allergic to work.” I was a hustler at heart. I knew how…

Filmmaker Joseph Alexandre’s fascination with the true story behind Martin Scorsese’s mob epic Casino started long before the movie’s release. It all began in the 1980s, while he was working at a Chicago style pizzeria and heard about “the guy,” a man who came around with his College Bowl picks. That “guy” was Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the…

Albanian drug boss Besnik Sinanaj was on a roll. Still only in his early 30s, he ran one of the hottest phone lines in the United Kingdom. Almost 100,000 calls were made to his London call center by people who, well, they wanted to buy cocaine. And…

Albanian gangster Denis Nikolla was sentenced to 18 years in prison followed by 5 years of supervised release on Friday for his role in an extortion plot involving a man with close ties to the Albanian Mafia and a corrupt…

The 1971 hit on New York Mafia boss Joseph Colombo – in public at the second Italian Unity Day rally - was one of the most infamous of its kind. Though the hitman was killed on the scene, questions remained. Four decades later, Colombo’s son Anthony reached a point where he didn’t want to keep the story in anymore. In…

The gang is back together! The entire (surviving) cast of The Godfather will reunite for one special evening. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire and the man behind the camera Francis Ford Coppola will come together on April 29 for the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing-night…